Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between technical innovation and changes in ethical responses to war, arguing that the rules of war adapt to successful new technologies by becoming more permissive._x000d__x000d_First, it presents the effects of the gunpowder revolution from on the rules of war in the Christian, Islamic and Hindu worlds, outlining the tension between the traditional rules of war and expediency. Despite stunning defeats, the Mamluks and Rajputs initially rejected gunpowder weapons as unworthy for good soldiers. _x000d__x000d_Two key points emerge. First, despite initial reluctance to adopt an unsportsmanlike new technology, the pressure to proliferate ultimately outweighed ethical concerns. Second, the critique of the new weapons focused on chivalric beliefs about the good soldier – rather than on concerns surrounding the weapons’ effects on human bodies (soldiers and civilians)._x000d__x000d_Finally, it explores the modern relevance of these points, observing parallels in nuclear proliferation today. While nuclear weapons' effects on humans and the environment are part of the debate, greater emphasis is placed on how such weapons alter the playing field – i.e., how nuclear proliferation challenges the prevailing chivalric norms.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: W.E.B. Dubois contended that the end of Abolition Democracy paved the way for U.S. imperialism overseas and led to the disenfranchisement of African Americans and people of color around the world. The response worldwide has been to fight hegemony through a Marxist/ socialist ideology. African American female radical activists schooled by their activism during the 1960s and the 1970s and following the rhetoric of Paul Robeson and DuBois, formulated an internationalist and Pan-Africanist world view. They supported Maurice Bishop�s Marxist/ Socialist People�s Revolutionary Government (1979) through remittances and direct action in Grenada. The People�s Revolutionary Government provided education, healthcare, women�s suffrage; workers rights, and services previously denied the Grenadian people, and they drew alliances with African Americans.
Disappointed by the destruction of the People�s Revolutionary Government due to the 1983 U.S. Invasion of Grenada, and invested in equality in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Central America, many African American women traveled to Nicaragua in 1984 in support of the pragmatic Marxist and progressive Catholic Sandinista Revolution, which provided literacy, health care, and housing programs. Black women traveled to Nicaragua and worked as Brigadistas---picking coffee, organizing Third World Brigades, and visited political and social organizations. They found common bonds with the Grenadians and Nicaraguans and successfully linked the struggle for Black civil rights to these Revolutionary movements.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Over the last few years, the European Union (EU) has taken several steps to increase the production levels of renewable energy. This has had notable implications for a number of different policy areas. The focus in this paper is the interplay between poli

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The idea that the United States is going through a
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has risen from a marginal place in
the realm of U.S. military thinking to a central role in studies of the
future of warfare. However, writing in academic political science has
trailed in its recognition of the importance of RMAs for international
security. RMAs can generally be defined as the synergistic combination
of innovations in military technology and changes in thinking about how
to organizationally use military force. RMAs give nations qualitative
increases in military capabilities that change the nature and structure
of international conflict, allowing them to conduct military operations
faster, in a broader geographic area, and with greater intensity. This paper focuses specifically on the nuclear revolution, testing the empirical importance of nuclear weapons for the initiation and escalation of international conflict. Three advances in the literature are developed. First, the data setup allows for comparative hypothesis testing to begin empirically evaluating the Waltz/Sagan debate. Second, the paper uses newly collected data on chemical and biological weapons to conduct empirical tests of their relative importance for international conflict. Third, the paper incorporates measures of uncertainty regarding WMD possession to determine the way varying levels of certainty influence the escalation of conflict.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Despite Marx minuting that, �the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world,� there is a heavily Eurocentric perspective in much historical sociology debate on state formation and the rise of the modern capitalist states-system. This impinges on attempts to understand the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures, and economic development in Europe resting on changes in social property relations. In contrast, a contribution is made in this paper to the focus on transformations in social property relations by understanding the social origins of the transition to capitalism in Mexico. There are two principal steps to the argument. First, there is a focus on processes of primitive accumulation that created the conditions of development for capitalist production and national consolidation of the internal market in Mexico. This is understood as a �passive revolution� based on state intervention to guide political modernisation. Second, this account of �passive revolution� in Mexico is related to the subsequent unfolding of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and specifically its so-called �institutional phase� between 1920-1940. Overall, the argument promotes an understanding of state formation and processes of primitive accumulation by tracing the class strategy, or �passive revolution�, of the state in Mexico, which gave capitalism there a particular form consistent with authoritarian and hegemonic influence.